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Marketing Sherpa is a must-follow site for anyone involved in online marketing. Sherpa provides invaluable insight into current online marketing trends and solid research to support its conclusions. In a recent article, titled “Perceptions about Social Media are Changing,” Sherpa offers some priceless advice on corporate forays into the Facebook/Twitter scene.

The 17% of organizations who still believe social media marketing is basically free and should stay that way, are destined to get what they pay for.

Not surprisingly, those who have reached the strategic phase of social marketing maturity are far more likely to be producing measurable ROI or at least seeing signs of a return on their investment on the horizon.

On the other hand, marketers in the trial phase of social marketing maturity are more than four times as likely to not recognize the value this tactic has for organizations willing to invest appropriate time and resources.

Getting social media right takes time and planning. Jumping in haphazardly will only produce haphazard results, or none at all. Setting goals, and then devising a plan to achieve them, is the only way to go.

Your newsletter, blog, Facebook and Twitter pages should represent individual parts of a total marketing strategy. Each piece should work symbiotically with the others.

Readers who congregate on different media are often interested in different aspects of your company. Take the time to find out where their interests lie, and then cater to them.

Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites have grown so rapidly because the personal interactions they provide are far more compelling than passive Web experiences offered elsewhere on the Internet. For companies, this offers an unprecedented opportunity to reach out to potential customers.

But attitudes on the Interent are far different than those encountered in traditional media, where audiences are largely passive. Talking at your readers, or trying to steer their conversations, will only drive them away. Once gone, they are unlikely to return.

Engage readers openly and honestly, and be part of their conversations, not a television blaring annoyingly in the background.

The New York Times recently talked to a few top-notch restaurant menu designers about ways to increase the bottom line. Turns out, designing restaurant menus is as much science as it is beautiful colors, and the wrong choices can kill profit margins just as sure as the right ones can boost it.Â Some highlights:

UPSIDE

good descriptions increase sales

so do good photos

reds and blues make people hungry

brand names also boost sales, compared to generic products

DOWNSIDE

grays and purples make people feel satiated

the dollar sign is bad; it re-enforces “the pain of paying”

.99 infers value, but not quality; .95 is better

In a tight economy, even a small increase in revenue can have a significant impact on a business, and the points about pricing resonate well beyond restaurant menus. The theory speaks directly to customer satisfaction, something no business can afford to overlook, even in the best of times.

Twitterfeed is a great little tool that will synchronize your blog, Twitter and Facebook pages. For every blog post, TwitterfeedÂ automatically updates your Twitter and Facebook pages. Blog once. Update across all three. Best of all, it’s free.

Getting set up could be a little easier, as the Twitterfeed interface is a bit wonky. But it’s well worth the 20Â minutes or so it takes to figure out how it works.

Overwhelmed by the frenetic pace of your online life? Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Twitter, LinkedIn, Hi5Â … the list is endless. Trying to keep control over so many social-networking personalities can lead to anxiety, sadness and despair. But there is an answer.

The rumors of a merge between WordPress and WordPress Multiuser began swirling around late May. In June, a lead developer at WordPress MU, Donncha O Caoimh, confirmed the consolidation. And the WordPress community celebrated.

But only briefly. After the announcement, questions of “when?” quickly followed, and for that Mr. O Caoimh had no ready answers.

In a nutshell, the merge of the two WordPress versions means that from 3.0 on, every WordPress installation will be capable of hosting multiple blogs/sites.

Different company employees, for example, could have their own blog — robert.k4media.com, jet.k4media.com, etc — but instead of multiple installs, with multiple databases, admins, etc, everything is in one easy-to-manage code base. Something along these lines might also be useful for a single company with several brands.

Users can have limited permissions for security reasons — no theme or plugin uploads, for example — while the Admin still retains God rights. Or Users too can have Admin privileges.

The merger also means that many cool MU projects, such as BuddyPress, the WordPress MU “social networking” plugin, will soon be available for the masses.

At K4 Media, we recommend WordPress a lot. Not so much as a blogging software, but as a content management system.

WP is very user-friendly

WP is designed to be customized (k4media.com runs on WordPress)

WP’s automatic update process makes staying current easy

WP is easily extensible with 1000s of plugins

WP is open source

In recent years, WordPress has evolved into much more that just blogging software. It really is a terrific little CMS, which is why we use and recommend it so much. The move to incorporate MU will only make WordPress that much stronger.

One of the new high-rises in the area is now partially blocking my line-of-sight, microwave Telesurf connection, and connectivity over the last few days has become painfully slow, although not completely severed. It would probably be better if it was. That would at least be less frustrating.

The good news is that Telesurf will upgrade my 9-year-old Chinese “speedbox” to Wimax today. The technician assures me this is much better than the ancient Chinese oracle that provides access and boils coffee now. We will see.

I first got Telesurf in 2002, when the number of ISPs was still in the single digits. The modem and antennae are holdovers from those early days. While there are many more providers today, my experience with a few of the others — Online, Camnet, Mekong — has been subpar. And nearly all of them would be more expensive than what I pay at Telesurf — about $55 per month for a 128k connection with a 1000mb data allowance.

After working out a few early bugs, Telesurf has been solid over the years. It almost never goes out, dropped connections — the bane of anyone who uses FTP –are rare, and customer service continues to improve. Their policy seems to be that a second complaint to customer service triggers a house call, sometimes in as little as 30 minutes.

So I complained on Saturday. And today, Monday, they will do something about the high-rise problem. I’ll let you know how it goes.

How much is your domain name worth? Ask Stimator to find out. You will probably be knocked off your chair. I certainly was.

royalgroup.com.kh = $9,004

k4media.com =$12,883

johnvink.com = $51,269

fcccambodia.com = $1,479,328

And what about heavies from the West:

playboy.com = $48,991

microsoft.com = $354,262

google.com = $369,937

nytimes.com =$371,083

To think, the FCC domain is worth more than the New York Times. It kind of makes sense when you think about it. Business is good for the FCC. The New York Times, like newspapers all over, is struggling.

I am just in the process of trying to install a few nifty plugins. Neither Search Everything nor Cforms wants to work. Bugger.

I’ve used Cforms many times in the past and it has always worked without flaw. Except when the permissions were not set correctly…

… the problem with Cforms hanging on “one moment please” took a bit of sleuthing, but it was extremely easy to fix. I had originally installed the plugin on my local development server. That process hard-coded in js/cforms.js the local install path, for some strange reason. The original block of javascript looks like this:

// ONLY in case AJAX DOESN’T work you may want to double-check this path: // If you do change this setting: CLEAR your BROWSER CACHE & RESTART you BROWSER! var sajax_uri = ‘/wp-content/plugins/cforms/lib_ajax.php’;

The local install had changed that last line to “http://192.168.1.10:8888/wp-content/plugins/cforms/lib_ajax.php,” which of course would not work in the live environment.

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About this blog

This blog is written from Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It covers topics such as Web design, search engine optimization, online marketing and other assorted Webby things. It is maintained by Robert Starkweather.